the Way of the Turtle

A Return Visit to the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge
Saturday, March 22, 2008

Saturday found Ann and I heading to Syracuse for a birthday party (one of Ann's friends) so we left Rochester early enough to stop somewhere along the way. I chose Montezuma because I knew it was easy to get to and hoped we might see some new birds, since the spring migrations have started.

Nothing to see at the visitor's center, which was closed for the season, so we took the short drive through the portion of the preserve south of the Thruway. Nothing much to see, except at a spillway between the Montezuma ponds and the Cayuga Seneca Canal, where hundreds of huge carp (about a foot long) were splashing around in the water. According to the sign nearby, in the spring when the Canal rises the carp try to get into the warmer, nutrient-rich waters of the preserve, while the folks managing the refuge do their best to keep them out so they won't stir up the silty bottoms of the ponds. We spent a little while there watching the fish, until finally we got cold enough that we decided to move on. Other than the fish, the main wildlife we saw were geese (lots of geese!) and gulls.

After exiting the drive, we headed over to the May's Point Pool, where we first spotted some black and white ducks (either buffleheads or goldeneyes - unfortunately they flew off as we got out of the car, so my only pictures ended up being pretty poor and not good enough to make a definite identification... Ann's vote is that they were buffleheads, and she's probably right, since she saw them for longer than I did through the binoculars.) From there we walked across the road to another small pond, where last fall we'd seen cormorants. Today we spotted a bald eagle soaring far off in the distance - with the binoculars we could just make out his white head and tail.

Then we drove down the road to the observation tower. No flocks of egrets today - just more geese, possibly the ducks that had flown away from us early, and a heron we spotted as we were driving down the road. We did catch sight of two birds paddling along, and I managed to snap a couple of pictures - I'm pretty sure they were a male and female hooded merganser. Eventually the cold wind got to be too much, so we headed back to the car, where Ann remembered to call one of her friends to get directions for later. While she was talking I had fun taking pictures of two flocks of geese that flew in and spent a while gyrating around the sky before finally choosing places to land.

We wrapped up out visit by going for a walk along the Esker Brook Nature trail on the western edge of the Refuge. The paths took us through a hardwood forest and up along the ridge of the esker (a ridge of rubble left behind when water flowed under a glacier some 10000 years ago) out to a small pond, then back through the woods on a hillside overlooking a small stream. It was pretty muddy in spots (a sure sign of spring) and unfortunately never really out of earshot of the Thruway, but still a fairly pleasant walk.

Our route back to the Thruway took as past the entrance to the preserve along Routes 5 & 20. The other times we've driven past there we've always noticed a series of huge nests on the tops of the electrical line towers, so today I pulled over briefly and had Ann take a couple of pictures. I don't know what kind of bird (besides a BIG one) built those nests, but they're very impressive, and also a nice reminder of the remarkable ability some wildlife has to adapt to human intrusions into their living spaces.

JMH